THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
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called. In a hollow close by was a good outcrop of the Crag, which latter was
seen resting upon the blueish-black clay, the crag being covered up in its turn by
so-called Chillesford beds and a capping of Glacial Gravel. Dr. Taylor delivered
a lecture on "The Crags of East Anglia ; their Fossils, Derivative and Indi-
genous." The lecture was illustrated by means of some specimen fossils from the
different strata, to which he made reference in his discourse. He asked them to
look at that cliff, not more than about 60 feet in height; how few people would
imagine that the beds which formed it had possibly required millions of years for
their formation. He showed that the lower or London Clay part had been de-
posited in the sea when a tropical climate existed, and it must have required
hundreds of thousands of years for the weather to have furnished the waste
materials of which that London Clay was composed. He then produced some of
the specimens from the London Clay, all of which were allied to kinds now living
in tropical climates. He showed that the London Clay was the home of the so-
called "coprolites." Dr. Taylor then produced, amidst great interest, some
specimens of original coprolites he had lately met with in an upper deposit of the
London Clay in Essex, and which he said was probably one of the parent sources
of those polished chocolate-coloured coprolites, or phosphatic stones, which had
been washed out of the London Clay and re-deposited in the Red Crag of
Suffolk.
The lecturer then dwelt upon the long period of geological time which had
elapsed between the formation of the London Clay and the Red Crag. He also
showed that at the junction of these two formations there was usually found a bed
of stones, and it was here that the largest and thickest beds of coprolites were
usually met with. The period of time which elapsed between that when the
London Clay had been deposited and the Red Crag was enormously long. Dr.
Taylor said it was a period of dry land denudation, waste, and wash ; and also
when great volcanic action took place in the British Isles, and volcanoes as high as
Etna existed in the north-west of Scotland, In a few sentences he depicted the
kinds of wild animals that had roamed over the Miocene land, and how they had
left their bones and teeth strewn over the surface as those of the bison are over the
praries of America. Then he showed them how the land gradually sank, and once
more became covered by the sea. Teeth and bones had been washed out of the
London Clay, and became commingled with those of the rhinoceros, tapir, and
mastodon, which had lived in the succeeding epoch, and, said Dr. Taylor, holding
up two teeth, "although these were found in juxtaposition in the same geological
graveyard, the animal which owned this tooth (Coryphadon) lived as long before
the creature which possessed this other tooth (Rhinocerus) as the latter lived before
ourselves—that is possibly hundreds of thousands of years."
Then the story of the Suffolk box stones was sketched—those wonderful relics
of a late Miocene formation, which have always so much interested Dr. Taylor,
and of which there is such a magnificent series in the Ipswich Museum. He
showed how these stones were also found commingled at the base of the Crag with
the derivative coprolites, bones, and teeth to which he had already alluded, and
how they were the wrecked fragments of strata which had once extended right
across the present German Ocean, and covered up a great part of Suffolk. He
then demonstrated, by specimens which were passed round, that all of this must
have taken place before the Red Crag shells were accumulated. Then he pointed
out that the great geological interest of the Walton Crag lies in the fact that it is
the oldest example of the formation in England, and is remarkably free from
derivative fossils, many shells being found in natural positions and perfectly un-